The city’s affordable housing finance unit is planning for the first time to issue bonds that will be packaged as commercial mortgage backed securities. This inaugural group of loans pegged at $550 million will be secured by the market-rate residential high-rise 8 Spruce Street, known as New York by Gehry, located in Lower Manhattan.

The Housing Development Corporation, which generally focuses on financing affordable housing for the city, will issue the bonds, which will then be packaged and divided into different risk levels and sold into the CMBS market. Wells Fargo will be the loan servicer.

Sources within the city agency said there were special circumstances that made the CMBS structure useful here, and it was not expected to become a common practice. This bond deal is similar to two the state’s New York Liberty Development Corporation structured to finance 1 Bryant Park and 7 World Trade Center, but this is the first for the city.

Nonetheless, insiders said it showed an inventive use of market tools.

“It demonstrates HDC’s willingness to get creative on structuring in order to diversify how HDC-financed projects are capitalized,” Ben Thypin, director of market analysis with data firm Real Capital Analytics, said.

Ben Carlos Thypin

I am currently the co-founder of Quantierra, the world's first data driven real estate brokerage and investment manager. In my former life as Director of Market Analysis at Real Capital Analytics, I worked with press outlets large and small to provide them with great data and insightful commentary. Here are some of the results of this collaboration. For the rest, please check out the News Archive.